June 20, 2023

In the early days of our marriage Greg and I used to spend at least a week a year aboard my parents boat, the Raellen. They kept the boat in Olympia and would bring it up to Anacortes mid summer and take it on adventures around the San Juan Islands. We would drive up from Seattle and join them. Now my mother was from Montana, and boating was definitely NOT in her French blood! She didn’t know how to swim, and had no intention of learning, and found the sea very intimidating. However, my dad “Bob” usually got his way, so boating they went! We have vivid memories of heading out from Cap Sante Marina into the Guemes Channel and as we turned the corner my mother would look out at and say the dreaded words, “Fog Bob!!!”. Yup, there is often fog in Rosario Strait, and my mother did not like it one bit. So when we woke up this morning, absolutely socked in with a fog bank at Foggy Bay Inlet (how fitting), we could hear my mothers words echoing from heaven. We really wanted to get to Ketchikan around noon, and the seas were calm (as they often are with fog present) so the radar went on and off we went. Thank goodness for GPS navigation because we could not see a thing in front or around us. We were both engaged with scanning the radar for any vessels that might be on our path. Fortunately we found none as we motored towards our goal. About 2 hours East of Ketchikan we started to see some heat blips on the radar, and suspected some small vessels and indeed, the fog dispersed and we could see the fishermen out along with the beautiful snow capped mountains and never ending trees.


The remainder of the cruise was pretty uneventful and we hit the fuel dock on the way into our slip at the main downtown Marina, Thomas Basin, in the heart of downtown Ketchikan. There were two absolutely HUGE cruise ships in town, but they were loading up and getting ready to depart so now we and planning a quiet evening in this very interesting and lovely little town. We saw our friends from Anacortes on their Nordic Tug at the fuel dock, and we look forward to seeing them for dinner one night this week.
One other strange event happened today: the depth sounder suddenly started working! Greg was on the phone with the RayMarine rep and suddenly the numbers lit up. It is good to have it back but we don’t know exactly why it quit working or why it restarted. The Rep gave Greg some ideas to reboot the system which we will try while we’re are here at the dock.

The bow thruster is different issue, but Greg was able to maneuver the boat into the slip with “no sparks, no splinters” as we like to say.
Greg’s highlight of the day was FINALLY getting “the tee shirt”!

Nice shirt, Greg! Glad you made it to Ketchikan without incident. Good luck with the thruster!
Great looking shirt. Glad you made it and very good to hear your sounder is working. Hope you can convince the bow thruster to get with the program. Enjoy.
The Ketchikan T-shirt you need is one that says “Ketchikan – Drinking town with a fishing problem”. Go back next year and get one. Congrats you two on an epic adventure!